Around 1880, the back-breaking labour of the heroic John Gribble carved ‘The Camp of Mercy’ out of the bush on the edge Murrumbidgee River near Darlington Point.  For several decades, Aboriginal people, fugitives from ill-treatment, fled to the camp he named Warangesda, a blending of the Wiradjuri word for ‘camp’ and the Hebrew word for ‘mercy.’ It’s been described as the only sanctuary available for them in NSW at the time.
 
Last weekend, former residents and friends gathered to mark the centenary of its closure. Among them was Reverend Cannon Shannon Smith, a sixth generation Wiradjuri and fifth generation Worimi descendant whose great-great-grandfather, James Murray, arrived with Reverend John Gribble. In an ABC interview she explained that a lot of the returning original Warangesda folk remained strong Christians. When once she was asked, ‘Who evangelised you?’ her unexpected reply was, ‘I was evangelised by the Rev J B Gribble in 1880, because he was the one who brought Christianity to my people … And here I am today, still going!’

 In 1940, out on the edge of the NSW Outback, Labour Party Whip Mark Davidson, the member for Bourke and Cobar, was almost a lone voice speaking up for the Aboriginal people in Parliament.
 
 “The aboriginal population of New South Wales has been dying out since the advent of the white man. They are in the minority, and it seems they are being treated as Hitler treats minorities on the other side of the world, although perhaps not so forcibly. They are being treated in a manner that will bring about their extinction.”
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Given the times, the Catholic member’s speech was strikingly brave and may have been prompted by an event 2 years previously in Melbourne.
 
On the night of November 8th 1938, Nazi paramilitary forces, members of Hitler Youth along with ordinary citizens, had spilled into city streets for a night of violence that launched the slaughter of 6 million European Jews.
 
The eerie sounds of shattering glass from 7000 Jewish owned businesses, the roar of flames consuming 200 synagogues, the cries of anguish from 30,000 throats as men women and children were herded into trucks destined for concentration camps, carried 16000 kms half-way round the world.

This ‘Kristallnacht’ became a word of infamy across the globe. But who cared? One Australian living in Melbourne knew more than just glass had been broken.

When my Tongan mate Puluno Efoti was invited to Parramatta as their Australia Day Ambassador, he was excited.  Why? Because it is giving him the chance to tell the story of a local girl who began a movement that transformed the people of his island nation over two centuries ago. She was one of the first-generation Australian kids who were derisively labelled ‘Currency Lads and Lasses’ - implying they were of inferior quality.
 
Parramatta girl Mary Hassall was one who proved them wrong. Mary was born in Sydney in 1799 to adventurous young parents.  These two had made the dangerous journey half-way round the world from Cornwall to Tahiti, planning to give practical expression to the Christian gospel among the native people as ‘artisan’ missionaries.
 
Mary’s father Rolland proved himself a man of bold character and a big heart and he needed both. Feuding Tahitian tribes forced the 29-year-old carpenter to retreat to safety with his young family to Sydney, only to be immediately beaten up by thugs, robbed and left penniless. Undaunted, he and his brother-in-law began travelling around outlying settlements preaching and setting up schools.

 New Year’s Eve, Sydney Harbour December 31st 2024  Robbie Williams and a chunk of the million strong crowd of revellers belt out the words of John Farnham’s stirring The Voice anthem, ‘We’re not gonna sit in silence, we’re not gonna live with fear!’ At the time I wondered ‘What resolutions sprang from that for 2025?’ There’d be a thousand possible I reckon.
 
Now that the smoke from $8M fireworks has drifted away, I’m asking myself what I’m going to use my voice for here in Oz. I decided if I’d had a chance to write a slogan across the Harbour Bridge that night, it would have been RE-STORYING AUSTRALIA.

 It was no accident that Joseph and Mary journeyed to their ancestral home in Bethlehem for the birth of Jesus. For a thousand years that obscure country village had nurtured the most powerful family story in history – one that was far from perfect. Nevertheless, God’s design from the beginning was to bring blessing through families and at the end of history to bring all His children home. As my own family gathers for Christmas, I’m deeply grateful for what’s been handed down to us.
 
As the Outback Historian, I’m wrapping up the year with snatches of stories I’ve tried to make visible and some glimpses behind-the-scenes with friends who’ve loaned their gifts. I’m convinced that the face of Jesus will emerge as we work hard to bring to light remarkable stories of innovative Australian men and women of faith.

​When I moved my family from Bourke to Broken Hill in 1988, we found ourselves plunged into a very different slice of Inland Australia. Gritty, grassless and gravelly, it bred people of a different kind – like artist Pro Hart, considered ‘the father of the Australian Outback painting movement.’ This rough-and-tumble ‘Michelangelo of the scrub’, splashed his novel artwork on the Rolls Royce he drove down Sulphide St and on the covers of the New Testaments he freely handed to stranger and friend, with equal relish.

The historians who scripted Ken Burn’s award-winning American documentary series The Civil War, told me their secret was simply ‘telling the big story through the little story.’ That meant tracking the lives of individual soldiers through their letters and photographs to create a highly personal window through which to look at a mind-numbingly large and graphic story.

When Reg Nancarrow entered the world in outback Bourke in 1887, there was nothing to suggest this boy would die half a world away in Belgium, leading headlong advance of Australian troops over what one eyewitness described as ‘a carpet of corpses’ at the battle of Polygon Wood.
 
By the time he left for the war in 1915, the thirty-year-old bush-bred lieutenant was a popular sportsman around Orange and his first-hand reports from the Front were being eagerly followed by readers of The Orange Leader as a kind of virtual experience of what ‘their boys’ were going through.

​It's been said that when people settle in a new country, to feel at home, they have to fill the unfamiliar landscape with their own myths and heroes. Andrew ‘Banjo’ Patterson was one of the poets who sang larger-than-life figures from the bush into the heart-scape of Australia over a century ago, just as our rough colonies were melding into a nation.
 
The image of the intrepid man from Snowy River hurling his horse down a steep High-Country slope has been etched into the minds of generations of Australians. Schoolkids still delight in telling the story of the bearded bushie from Ironbark tricked into thinking his ‘bloomin’ throat had been cut’ by a wily barber.
 
Banjo’s melancholy song of the lone swagman throwing himself into a billabong to escape the police lingers on as our unofficial national anthem and tugs at the heart strings of Aussies a long way from home. And, somewhere in the back-country of our collective imagination, the carefree drover Clancy of the Overflow still sings as he musters cattle on sunlit plains stretching away and away.

​Gunnedah sits at the junction of the Namoi and Mooki Rivers on the North West Slopes of NSW. It boasts two heroes of a very different kind. One is Cumbo Gunnerah, 'The Red Kangaroo' as he was called by his people, a great warrior and revered leader of the Gunn-e-dar people of the Kamilaroi tribe. He was born, lived and died a child of the wilderness, long before the white men came.
 
The other is Dorothea McKellar, daughter of native-born parents, who grew up protected and highly cultured, moving easily between three worlds - the society of Sydney's elite, her brothers' farms near Gunnedah and among family friends in London. She is best known for her bush poetry.
 
They couldn’t be more contrasting figures and yet they shared much in common. The Bush spoke to them both. The fabled war chief hunted far and wide across his native territory between the New England Ranges and the Warrumbungle Mountains – he read it like a book.
 
The accomplished city girl learned the beauties and terrors of her wide brown land as she rode the same mountains and Breeza Plains on horseback. Both were intelligent and proficient in several languages. In their own ways, both understood the spirit of the land.